Blogging as Professional Meditation

Came across this American Express Open Forum video tonight while researching social media for nonprofits.


It features Seth Godin, everyone's favorite online marketing guru. (He was the driving force around Yahoo's marketing for a while and is known for quick-read books on marketing. They're so quick, quippy, and direct, it's like reading a 100 tweets in a row.) It also features management consultant god Tom Peters.

What I love about this video is that he makes a completely different case for blogging. It glances over the "world's gonna beat a path to my door if I do this" mentality to get to what I have discovered for myself and others have told to me. There is a clarity that comes from regularly sitting down to think through elements of what you're doing, what you're working on, ideas you're exploring, and just plain having the discipline to talk to yourself on a regular basis in a way that you'd explain your thoughts to others.

It's meditation that also churns out solid marketing and communications materials. Speeches. White papers. Case studies. That kind of stuff. There's also the side where you discover an idea really didn't work... or that it needs more tinkering before it's ready for daylight. (There are quite a few posts I start but never publish because they didn't quite reach full birth.)

Definitely worth the 90 seconds or so it takes to watch the conversation.